It’s just a few minutes in to the film Gravity, and hurtling space debris shit is about to hit the motherf*ckin fan. Will Ryan (Sandra Bullock) and Matt (George Clooney) make it?

Of course they will. Do the math. The film is 90 minutes long. It’ll get bumpy, like the very worst turbulence on the very worst flight you’ve ever had, times shitzillion. But Rudy and Matt are going to make it through because you—cinema goer—have paid for 90 minutes and what else is going to happen for the next 80? It’s not like Actual LifeTM where tragedy will mercilessly cut short someone’s earthbound existence irrespective of where it is in his or her own advertised running time. Dead at 15? Sure. Struck down at four years of age? Happening all the time. Within ten minutes of being born? Sadly, yes.

However, in Gravity, where there are only two characters to start with (I’m not counting Shariff with the racist accent), we are sure that early adversity will be overcome. It has to. For the sake of the film. For the sake of your entertainment.

Question. What would a film be that stayed true to Actual LifeTM? To its contingent and brutal suddenness?

Answer 1 would be a film that doesn’t last 90 minutes, but however short the amount of time it takes for the protagonists to pass away. Ten minutes. Twenty. It would be brutish and fast, over before you’ve made yourself comfortable. House lights on. Exit to the right. What do you do with the extra 80 minutes given to you?

Answer 2 is found at the end of Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1961). Alain Delon and Monica Vitti’s desultory affair anti-climaxes in a way that has never been done before in cinema—and maybe, never since. After making love for the last time, they agree to meet “at the usual place” that evening, 800pm. But their (empty) eyes tell the true story of what is (not) about to happen. Come 800pm, and the camera turns up at the rendezvous point. However, neither Delon nor Vitti appear. Instead of zooming out and fading away (what any conventional film would have done), Antonioni’s camera continues to film the non-meeting meeting. We see: a woman with a child. A man crossing the road. The flayed sides of buildings. Tarmac. Factory smoke. It goes on for some seven minutes. No flashback or forward. No voiceover. No resolved comfort. Delon and Vitti’s parting opens up this pregnant space, full their vital absence. The film continues without the characters.

Answer 2, then, is a film that fills the remaining 80 minutes with the world without its glittering protagonists—and not in some sentimentally cathartic way (depictions of bereaving family, a husband that can’t cope, Autumn leaves shedding, etc). It would show how radically same the world continues to be when someone is no longer part of it. A kind of limpid thrust forward into the near future. Newton’s Second motherf*ckin Law.

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Antonioni is summoned again in Gravity. This time, the end of Zabriskie Point seems to make a cameo appearance.

It’s the only other sustained piece of cinema I can recall that shares Gravity’s relentless anti-gravitational derangement. We are stranded with Ryan and Matt, tumbling and spinning with them, against the vast widescreen of Mother Earth. Home. Gravity is, paradoxically, bereft of its title. It is “anisotropic”—the usual axes of top, bottom, left and right, which we measure by our own perpendicularity against the surface of the earth, all this is gone. The cinema screen (and the inside of Rudy’s helmet visor) is a well of black void in which things—pens, decomposing bodies, tears—float. Most space movies get around the finnickiness of zero gravity by taking place in battle-ship sized space-ships where gravity works just fine. Space, phenomenologically speaking, is just earth further away.

In the Zabriskie Point clip here, the compositions of exploded matter become more and more unmoored. They attain the quality of gestural abstract painting, with the blue of the sky taking the place of the white of canvas. In Gravity, the sky is black; Earth is blue. The screen isn’t flat—and neither is our fear of being lost in the beyond. It’s a shame, then, that Gravity loses its nerve quickly. It succumbs to the necessity to join the dots of personal salvation. In doing so, it becomes the “ultimate problem solving” movie (says Sophia Al Maria). A vast and expensive first person POV video-game puzzle with instructions in Russian and Mandarin. Whereas 1970s “existentialist” sci-fi film would leave its characters lost in the forever emptiness of space (the way Sartre said man was banished to his/her own freedom once God vanished), Gravity ultimately needs the stable ground of narrative closure. Ryan struggles to stand up. It’s primeval mud. But she does stand. She walks.

Certain neurologists claim that the brain’s experience of the present lasts between 2.0 and 2.5 seconds. Everything before this is before and everything after is future far away.

It is the 15th anniversary of The Lunar Prospector being launched into orbit around the moon and finding frozen water there, close to where Ramzi Yousef was sentenced to life imprisonment for planning the first World Trade Center bombing, just north of Hugo Chávez’ Presidential election victory in Venezuela.

Since time is vast (maybe endless, depending on whose eschatology you buy into) and the past keeps increasing in size and depth, we’ve invented tools to make time tangible to our minds and graspable in our everyday lives. Without these tools, we’d drown in time’s gooey unknowability. The way it overwhelms us by never really being there.

It is the 13th anniversary of the world not ending Y2K-style, sparked by the billionth person being born in India, whose soul was the reincarnation of the recently departed Walter Matthau. Or Alex Guiness. Or Douglas Fairbanks. No, it was Hedy Lamarr’s.

The duration of a single day links us with the earth’s planetary spin, the pirouetting of the moon, tide-sway, and birdsong. This in turn synchs our shops and TV stations and office hours with nature’s unstoppable cycles. A day is the smallest unit of time that begins, middles and ends.

It is the 12th anniversary of the Taliban destroying the first Apple retail store in Glendale, CA, news of which never made it to Douglas Adams, Aaliyah or Timothy McVeigh. They had already recently passed away.

As Mircea Eliade pointed out in The Myth of Eternal Return, traditional man relives time, over and over again, to invoke mythical time, impelled by “nostalgia for the origins.” This is what gives him or her orientation against the nausea of eternity.

It is the 11th anniversary of the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, whose increased airport checks led to a large section of the Antarctic Larsen Ice Shelf beginning to disintegrate. Victims included Billy Wilder, Lisa ‘Left-Eye’ Lopes and Pierre Bourdieu.

Anniversaries are modern navigation instruments amidst the accumulation of time. To paraphrase the historian Eric Hobsbawm, anniversaries protest against default forgetting. Anniversaries organise human history—so much smaller than geological history but already incomprehensible for any one individual—into short bursts of collective memory.

It is the 10th anniversary of Dewey (the first deer clone) and Prometea (the first horse clone) being born, the final puzzle pieces to the completion of the Human Genome Project and the capturing of Saddam Hussein in Tikrit, Iraq.

To Anniversarise: summon the past into the present on a significant day. Remembering is re-enactment. The dead are allowed to undie one day a year, a decade, a century. Just now, I have been told, ‘Today would have been Kafka’s 130th birthday.’ With that, an occasion to reminisce and revisit Kafka’s writings, letters and loves arise.

It is the 8th anniversary of the first human face transplant becoming the first uploaded video on YouTube as a direct result of the founding of the Kyoto Protocol. Eight years since a bomb blast killed Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson, rocker Johnny Carson and comedian Richard Pryor.

Where do we go today to find out what happened before we might forget forever? Wikipedia. Our free, commons archive. The one that compiles collective witnessing. In fact, this collective witnessing (that may spill into fantasising or misremembering) is now the primary source of history many of us rely on hundreds of times a week. Thousands of times a year. Eternally returning.

It is the 5th anniversary of Iran launching a rocket into space, controlled by the first implanted bionic eyes. Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy protection upon hearing of the sudden deaths of Studs Terkel, Alain-Robbe Grillet, David Foster Wallace and Bobby Fischer.

If you enter a number into Google that looks like an Anno Domini date—1536, 1979, 2003—the first result is the Wikipedia page entry of that year. It will tell you what day January 1st fell on and then proceed to list, in chronological order, notable historical events, month by month. After which come the births. Then, most poignantly, the deaths.

It is the 3rd anniversary of Tunisian fruit-seller Mohammed Bouazizi committing self-immolation at the top of the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa just as it opens. Wikileaks’ first leak tragically brings about the deaths of reclusive author JD Salinger and inventor of the fractal, Benoit Mandlebrôt.

When I read the year pages on Wikipedia as continuous prose, something happens to past time. New adjacencies emerge. Unknown causalities between unrelated points on earth and its people. Undiscovered ricochets in geopolitical matrices. Not only is the world flat, Thomas Friedman, but history becomes flat too. A month is 2.5 seconds eye-scanning. A year is scrolled through in a few minutes. There’s a kind of chrono-dyslexia that produces conspiratorially rich cause and effect. The father of deconstruction (Jacques Derrida) dies and so does the father of Palestinian independence (Yasser Arafat). Accident? Providence? Myth? Coincidence? Because, Wikipedia’s faceless annotators have distilled the history of everything into a selective sequence of bullet-pointed somethings. This distillation: new, strange, entanglements of retrospective earth destiny.

Maybe it’s all happened before. We’re in the future looking back. Happy birthday. Rest in peace. I’m lost. That’s OK. We are too. As Eliade wrote, ‘In our day, when historical pressure no longer allows any escape, how can man tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history—from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings—if beyond them he can glimpse no sign, no transhistorical meaning; if they are only the blind play of economic, social, or political forces, or, even worse, only the result of the “liberties” that a minority takes and exercises directly on the stage of universal history?’